


saying your names

by neiboIt



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Afterlife, Canon Compliant, Coming Out, Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-13 19:02:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20587484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neiboIt/pseuds/neiboIt
Summary: Names of places we’ve been together, names of people we’d be together, names of endurance, names of devotion, street names and place names and all the names of our dark heaven crackling in their pan.Richie leaves Eddie, but Eddie never leaves him.





	1. eddie

**Author's Note:**

> i know we’re in a fix-it fic frenzy, but this has been itching at me since i left the theater last thursday, so here it is. title and epigraph come from richard siken’s “saying your names.”

Richie is forty-three when he tells the world what he is.

(By the world, he, of course, means the five—_six—_Losers still within reach. Both of his parents are dead, buried far from Derry, and nobody else matters enough to know.)

He doesn’t know what took so long. Three years have passed since It sunk into the earth and took the house on Neibolt Street with it. Three years since Bill and Mike and the rest of them dragged him, screaming and fighting from what he still thinks should’ve been his grave, too. Three years since he said goodbye.

It’s not that he’s scared. He’s not. Not anymore. Truly. He _ swears_.

It’s just that he wanted to hold on a little while longer. Wanted to keep Eddie and the Kissing Bridge and his heart to himself. Wanted to quietly wait for the day he’d wake from this bad dream to the smell of coffee brewing in the kitchen and Eddie thumbing through the Sunday paper, wrapped up in a t-shirt stitched for broader shoulders. Wanted to wait until he could kiss his crow’s feet and tell him, finally, “Hello, darling. Welcome home.”

(Except he’d never call him that. Eddie would never _ let _ him.

He’d lean down, and he’d press his mouth against his temple, and Eddie would swat him away, rattling off some complaint about his morning breath. Then he’d insist that his mother—good ol’ Mrs. K, may she rest in peace—never minded its stench, and Eddie would shoot him one of those piercing glares that he’s so good at, and Richie would take his jaw in his hand and kiss him like he ought to be kissed, and they’d laugh, and they’d be so fucking happy it hurt.

He’s thought about this a lot.)

Three years, and that day hasn’t come yet, and he’s tired of waiting.

It happens in one of the only Jewish cemeteries in all of steamy Atlanta, the burning summer sun making its gradual descent into the horizon. They’ve been sitting there for hours or days, shooting the sheet and sharing half-remembered stories from what feels like a lifetime ago. There are bottles of wine, or there were, but they’re gone now. The taste has since soured on Richie’s tongue.

They do this every year: they travel from their respective corners of the world to gather in Atlanta and drink around Stan’s grave. Not _ on _ the anniversary of his death—they leave that for Patty—but a day or two after. The first time, it was planned. Mike drove up from his condo in Orlando, Ben and Beverly cut a Mediterranean vacation short, Bill put his latest novel on hold.

The second and third time around, it was understood.

He sits alone, legs crossed, gaze fixed on the shiny silver ring Bev’s been sporting since April. It’s simple and beautiful, just like her. The longer he stares, the tighter the knot of jealousy in Richie’s stomach gets, but he’s happy, too. Happy for them, happy that they got their happily ever after. Happy that he got to be a part of their wedding, even happier that they got to have a wedding at all.

He just wishes…

He just wishes.

She and Ben are touching everywhere they can: her legs draped over his lap, his hand resting comfortably on her knee, her fingers ghosting idly over the nape of his neck. His cheeks are flushed pink, and they look so in love that it makes Richie’s heart lurch in his chest.

Bill sits to his left. Bill, who he hates just as much as he loves. Bill, who he blames but can’t fathom holding fully responsible. 

“Audra is improving every day,” he says, and the only word he trips over is her name, like he can’t stomach speaking it. Richie understands. “Her doctors still can’t figure out exactly what’s wrong with her, but they take good care of her. And I get to visit her as much as I want.”

He falls silent, and in the time it takes for him to start back up again, Richie shares a knowing glance with Bev. They’ve both seen what Audra’s seen. They’ve both had parts of them shattered by the deadlights, too.

A shiver rolls up his spine.

“It’s not so bad,” Bill says finally, a far off look in his eyes.

Richie understands that, too.

(He’s also thought a lot about what life would’ve looked like if Eddie had survived. 

If his jacket had staunched the bleeding like it was supposed to. If It had succumbed just a little bit faster. If he’d been at his side. If he’d thought about trying CPR, if he’d had the time, if there’d been fucking_ anything _ of Eddie’s chest left to compress.

Richie knows that he would never be whole again: the nick in his cheek would scar—an impermeable memory of the worst day of their lives, proof that they were_ there,_ proof that they _ fought_—and his torso would stay a mangled mess of a thing forever. 

But he’d be alive, and that would be enough for Richie, even if he was never quite the same. Even if the fire that’s been licking at his insides since they were kids was snuffed. Even if he was hospital bound like Bill’s wife, if Richie had to spend the rest of their lives sleeping on uncomfortable sofas, lulled there by the steady beep of Eddie’s heart monitor, eating shitty cafeteria food to get by.

It wouldn’t be so bad.)

Once Bill’s finished recounting his year, the group turns to Richie expectantly. Mike, Ben, Beverly, Bill, all waiting for the latest scoop on Richie Tozier’s fucking _ awesome _ life. Itching for hot gossip, juicy anecdotes, like how March came and went and he couldn’t eat, sleep, or shower because all he could think about was how much Eddie loved ice cream cake, how his shitheel mother forbade it because it might irritate her precious Eddie-Bear’s _ sensitive teeth_, and how he’ll never have it again.

Richie recognizes his friends’ unease, knows what they’re wondering without having to ask: maybe _ this _ will be the year he talks about it.

But it won’t be, and it won’t be next year either. Or the year after that. Or any year at all.

His grief is his alone. It’s the one thing he’ll keep for himself.

(He remembers trying once, in the midst of a harsh Californian winter. He remembers calling Bev—delirious, panicked, desperate—with perfect clarity. It was the first time in almost three years that he tried reaching out, and now, months later, he doesn’t know what he thought it would accomplish. He remembers that it took her four rings to pick up, though, and he remembers her voice, rough with sleep: “Rich?”

“It didn’t work,” he’d choked out, a sob stuck in his throat. “That ugly fucking—_ fucker _ is taking shit from me again. I can _ feel _ it. It’s in my fucking _ brain,_ Bev.”

“Slow down. Slow down, Richie. What are you talking about?”

“I can’t remember. I can’t remember his voice.”

For _ years _ , it was the only thing he could hear. In songs on the radio, in the crowds at his shows, in stuffy restaurants and sweaty bars and sterile offices. The sight of him, flat on his back in It’s cavernous home, soaking in blood and sewage, haunted Richie, sure, but it was his voice that kept him up at night: _ I fucked your mom _ , and then, later, his ragged _ Don’t call me Eds,_ and the fucking death rattle that stole the last of his words from him. From Richie.

It was then that he realized he was having an asthma attack.

But that wasn’t right. Couldn’t be right. _ He _ didn’t have asthma. _ Eddie _ had asthma. _ Eddie _ carried his inhaler everywhere. _ Eddie _ was the one whose lungs sputtered and seized and struggled with their most basic function. 

It was all Eddie. Everything. Everything was Eddie.

“Honey,” Beverly had sighed, and in that moment, Richie swore he could _ taste _ the damp death stench of It’s lair, the metallic echo of Eddie’s seeping wound. In an instant, he was there again, feeling his whole world cooling beneath his palms. “It’s dead. We killed It.”

“Then why—”

“Because. Things slip away. They get hazy.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re moving on.”)

The Losers wait. He stares at Stan’s headstone, and they stare at him, and they wait until he’s ready, just like they’ve been waiting since that last swim at the quarry.

“Just another year in paradise,” he says finally, mouth still sour. “Highlight was definitely getting called a faggot in the Walmart parking lot last week, though. Don’t know how they knew, but good for them, right? Perceptive fuckers.”

For a beat, there’s just the soft buzz of a southern summer around them. Nobody even breathes.

Saying it out loud is an odd kind of exhilarating. It’s a half-confession at best, but it’s the closest he’s ever gotten in forty-three years, and it’s a little like having his whole fucking life pulled out from underneath him. His stomach is doing somersaults, his heart is in his mouth, and he thinks, for the third time in his life, that his lungs have stopped working. He thinks he must be suffocating.

It’s not a good feeling.

Mike speaks first, then Bill, though Richie wonders how he can enunciate so clearly with his foot so far down his fucking throat.

“Richie—”

“What do you mean ‘how they knew’? You’re not a—” He stops, careful. “You’re not gay.”

If Stanley was there, really there, he would chastise Bill for Richie. He would squint at him, brow furrowed, and he would murmur his name in that delicate, chiding way that they only ever let Stan get away with. Nobody would question it, and nobody would think Richie any lesser, because _Stan_ doesn’t, and everybody’s always known that Stan’s the best of them all.

The responsibility falls to him instead. Or, it would have, if Bev didn’t step in first: “Beep _ beep,_ Bill.”

Still curled around her, Ben chortles: a shocked, involuntary sound that immediately slices through the tension. Mike follows, then Beverly, and finally Bill joins in. Suddenly, they’re all laughing, even Richie, like Big Bill getting beeped is the funniest thing that’s ever happened to any of them. 

Maybe it would be, if it didn’t make Richie’s chest feel so tight.

(Stanley had it figured out when they were fifteen, two summers after everything fell apart and was pieced back together again. 

For once, it was just the two of them. Beverly had moved to Portland just weeks after It slunk away to lick its wounds, the Denbroughs were vacationing in Florida, and Mrs. K had Eddie quarantined, convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that a single mosquito bite would kill her baby boy. He can’t recall why Ben and Mike weren’t there, too, but he’s glad they weren’t. Glad that he got to while the day away with Stan and even gladder that, twenty-five years after the fact, he got it back.

Everything from that afternoon is still slippery, though. Trying to remember it—what they did, where they went, who they saw—is like trying to remember a dream. The lines all blur together.

He guesses that’s just growing up.

What he_ does _remember is this: Stanley at his side, skinny legs dangling over the side of the Kissing Bridge, both of their gazes fixed on the sunset blooming in reds and oranges and purples across the summer sky. Richie’s hand in his mouth, sucking the last remnants of an ice cream cone from his fingertips. Stan asking, gentle, “You’re not like the rest of us, are you, Rich?”

He had cracked a joke, but he knew, even then, that his heart wasn’t in it: “Of course I’m not. I’m not a fucking shrimp-dicked virgin.”

Stan, always too patient for his own good, hadn’t pressed it any further. He hadn’t needed to. He had already known.)

Nobody, not even Bill, questions it again. The knot of tension coiled in his chest doesn’t unwind, but at least he doesn’t have to talk about it.

Eventually, though, the Atlanta afternoon gives way to a heavy, humid evening, and they have to say their goodbyes. Richie hears, distantly, Bill’s promise to Mike, his millionth reassurance that they’ll see each other at Thanksgiving. He feels Ben’s arms around him, squeezing, hugging, strong hands inventorying the weight he’s lost since last year. He goes through the motions because he has to, because they can’t stay in this grief-stricken idyll forever, because they all have lives waiting for them, places It can’t touch them.

When Bev—who’s always been wiser, who’s always been the first to see through his shit—whispers against his chest, the fissure in his heart gets a little deeper: “He’d be proud of you, Rich.”

She doesn’t say his name. She knows she doesn’t have to.


	2. eds

Seven months after Atlanta, Richie decides that he’s ready to date.

He tells himself that it’s okay, that it’s long overdue, that it’s not an insult to Eddie’s memory. Thirty years is long enough to spend on one love; three and change is long enough to mourn. After all, he’s just a month shy of forty-four, and he knows, distantly, that that means he’s running out of time to have anything resembling a normal life.

If he doesn’t try now, he’ll lose his chance. At least that’s what Richie tells himself.

(He doesn’t believe it one bit, and neither does Beverly, who looks at him with sad, wary eyes when he announces over coffee that he’s created a Tinder account. 

It’s an abrupt confession, almost as abrupt as the one at Stan’s grave, with just as much thought behind it. He doesn’t know why he’s like this: why he can only confide in his friends when he doesn’t want to, why the words he vomits up are never quite what he wants to say, why _ I want to give love another shot, Bev _ turns into a half-assed joke about DILFs somewhere between his heart and his mouth.

“Are you serious?” she asks, and there’s no bite in her voice, none of the gentle ribbing that he knows to expect. She’s uncomfortably serious.

His brow furrows in poorly feigned confusion, fingers twitching against his untouched scone as he says, “Why would I not be? I know it might be hard to believe, but I’m not exactly drowning in ass out here. My river runneth _ dry _ . Like, _ Tatooine _ dry. Like, Sonia fucking Kaspbrak’s sna—”

“Don’t make me say it, Richie.”

He doesn’t.

Silence settles over them then; it’s an absence as profound as Eddie’s, yearning openly for something _ more_. Something _ realer _than what he’s willing to give.

Stubbornly, he watches the gears in Beverly’s head turn and click for a long, empty moment, and she watches him back, searching. Finally, she lands on, “It’s okay if you’re not ready.”

“Why would I not be ready?” he asks. His gaze hardens, but something deep inside of him is screaming for him to_ just shut up already, shut up, she’s going to know, she can’t know, you can’t tell her, not that, she doesn’t get that_.

“What?” She looks confused.

He repeats himself, each syllable fiercer than the last: “Why would I not be ready, Bev?”

The question—the silence—_burns _ in the space between them.)

A week later, he matches with Dan: a paralegal six years younger than him, who works at one of the best real estate firms in the area, who vacations in places like Rome and Bangkok and Copenhagen, who grins wide and bright enough to light up all of Times Square. He’s seen Richie’s routine, thinks he’s _ hilarious_, can’t believe that he found him on Tinder, of all places. He’s never even heard of Derry, Maine. He loves carnivals.

He wants to take him to dinner, and Richie lets him.

(That smile doesn’t make his heart pound like Eddie’s did, though.)

When Dan shows up—three-quarters Richie’s height, delicate and thin, every last strand of his dark, dark hair combed and gelled into a perfect little coiff—Richie tells himself that it’s just coincidence. That it’s completely unreasonable to think that Eddie would be the only soft, pretty, anal-retentive monster of a man ever in his orbit. That plenty of men wear chenille cardigans and napkins on their laps while they eat.

It’s coincidence. It must be.

(He believes that as much as he believes he’s ready for this.)

By some cosmic grace, they make it through their first round of drinks relatively unscathed, though he practically inhales his (and very obviously lacks the good sense to be embarrassed by it). Across the table, Dan takes careful sips of a vodka cranberry, brown eyes shining with something Richie doesn’t quite understand.

If he’s judging him, he’s doing a damn good job of hiding it.

Still, a quiet, needy part of Richie expects him to pick a fight: to dig at him for drinking so quickly, to call him a hopeless fucking boozer, to warn him of the dangers of alcohol poisoning and fuss helplessly over all the ways he’s destroying his body.

(When they were kids, it was sugar: “You’re going to rot your teeth out of your head if you keep eating all that candy, Tozier. How does your dentist not hate you?” Then, just before she left for Portland, Bev introduced him to cigarettes, and with them came a new litany of complaints: “I’m not going to let you near me if you keep smoking those things, Rich,” and “It’s literally disgusting,” and “You stink like a _ graveyard_.”

Then, finally, at forty, as a muggy July night barreled toward the worst dinner of his adult life, a sharp tongue sliced away the only defense he had left: “Are you always that hard on your liver? Do you not want it to work?”

If he knows one thing to be true, it’s that Eddie was always looking out for him. Right until the very end.)

Dan’s voice cuts through the absent ringing in his ears, tears him from the sickly green place that his mind so often goes: “I know I keep saying this, and I _ know _ it’s kind of weird, so, please, forgive me, but it really is just so crazy to me that we’re here right now. Do you even know how long I’ve been watching your stuff? Longer than I can even remember. I’m obse—”

“The fanboy thing is cute,” Richie interrupts, voice cool. It feels wrong. “But please don’t tell me you’re just here for an autograph. I actually washed my hair for this, and I won’t hesitate to bill you for the shampoo.”

That bright, brilliant grin blooms across Dan’s face, and he says, “Please. Even I know better than to do something like that.”

Richie feels no relief.

He just blinks when Dan adds, “No conditioner?”

“Waste of time,” he says immediately, dismissive. More whiskey on his tongue, and his chest feels a little looser, his veins a little warmer. “I’m Trashmouth Tozier, remember? I have to maintain a certain _ look_.”

“What look is that?”

“Gar_bage _, of course.” The accent is terrible, a half-hearted attempt at something resembling French, but it’s not his best work. He drops it just as quickly as he picked it up. “I have to look like I rolled out of a fridge box on Skid Row at all times, or my agent’ll drop me. It’s in my contract.”

Dan straightens up then, and his expression gets too serious to be authentic, and he cracks a joke of his own, but it doesn’t feel right to Richie. 

Still, he goes through the motions of dinner, of a date, because he’s gotten far enough that he can’t turn back now. Because he has to, even if it’s with bitterness in his mouth. Their appetizers come, and eventually, entrees—steak, still mooing, for Richie and a delicate, healthy strip of salmon for Dan—join them, but he’s so far away that the taste barely even registers.

It’s just so _ wrong_, being here; he was wrong, Dan is wrong, and that wrongness—that horrible churning in his stomach—is an itch in the back of Richie’s brain that he can’t scratch, can’t shake off, no matter how hard he tries to swallow it down.

He prays it’s over soon.

Three drinks later, it finally, _ finally _ is, but then Dan looks at him with a glint in his eyes so _ Eddie _ that Richie wishes the sky would split open and swallow him whole, and he can’t help but say _ of course _ when he’s asked to walk him home.

It’s the crumple of a crushed pack of cigarettes, the flick of a lighter, the blissful scent of a cigarette that snaps Richie out of it.

Breath catching in his throat, he asks, “You smoke?”

(It’s December, and Derry is frozen over, but he and Eddie walk home anyway. They always do, a silent agreement between them that they’d rather brave the snow together than anything anywhere else. The rest of the Losers—the ones who are left, Stan and Ben and Mike—have long since given up on wet socks and chapped lips: they take the bus now, and Stan tells Richie constantly how they ought to, too, but he knows something Stan doesn’t.

He knows that the heat he’d get huddling against Mike on a sticky pleather seat would pale in comparison to the warmth that buzzes in his chest whenever Eddie’s near.

When Neibolt comes up on their right, they cross the street to avoid it, just like they always do, another silent agreement binding them to a habit that neither have the words to explain. Neither knows why it started, just that they can’t stop.

Richie tries not to think about it.

The worst part of his afternoon is always when they get to Eddie’s house, because his is first, and being left by Eddie is the worst kind of torture. He’d go to hell itself and back if it meant he didn’t have to suffer the ten minutes between their houses alone.

Like clockwork, though, the second Eddie steps away, he fishes a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket and lights up. It’s a small effort in quelling his loneliness, but an effort nonetheless.

“I’m not _ kidding_, Rich,” Eddie shouts suddenly from his porch, and Richie startles so hard that he almost drops his lighter into the snowbank. He thought he was gone, thought he had a safe moment to soothe the quiet thrum of anxiety in his throat. “If you thought your mouth was trash before, it’s a dump now.”

“Aw,” he coos, heart hammering in his chest for reasons he doesn’t want to admit out loud. “You care about my mouth that much, Eds?”

Scowling, Eddie barks back his usual, “Don’t call me that.”

“Whatever, _ Eds_,” he says, turning away from the house. Then, through an exhale of smoke, “Call me later?”

He can_ feel _ Eddie’s eyes roll, even with his back to him, can almost taste the venom: “I don’t know why you feel the need to ask _ every single day_, I call you _ every sin_—”

“Jeez! Save it for the phone!”

That night, as he waits for his call, the sickest, most desperate parts of Richie—the parts that he tried to leave carved in the wood of the Kissing Bridge—itch at him to think about all the things he knows he shouldn’t: how a flush rose in Eddie’s cheeks, redder and redder with every second, and how he never _ answered _ him either way, and how he looked back at the Kaspbrak house a block down the street and _ swore _ he could see Eddie still on the porch, watching him go.

By the time summer rolls around, Stan’s gone, the clubhouse is theirs, and he’s quit smoking. He doesn’t remember Eddie ever mentioning his mouth again.)

“I know,” Dan says, his apology stuck in the cadence of his voice. “I should’ve said something sooner. I swear, I’m trying to quit.”

The ringing in Richie’s ears is back, so loud he can’t hear himself think.

When he asks seconds later—too flirty to be sorry, smelling of tobacco and excitement and an unnervingly familiar cologne—for Richie to come upstairs, to share a glass of wine with him, it clicks into place what the problem is: Dan likes him too much. There’s no snap to his attitude, no scornful looks, no needlessly childish antics. Dan’s earnest where Richie knows Eddie wouldn’t be; it makes him a little sick.

If he didn’t like him, didn’t look at him with gleaming eyes and breathy giggles and that fucking thousand watt grin, he might be able to do this. He might be able to convince himself that almost is enough.

But it’s not. Not now, not ever, not in a million fucking years.

He declines the invitation, and when he steps apologetically away from Dan’s porch, it’s with a heavy heart and his phone in his shaking hands.

The next morning, Beverly wakes to three unread text messages, hours between them.

_ you were right i’m not ready _

_ i love him so much _

_ how do i stop? i want to know how to stop _

(Bev stares, heart pounding in her chest, frozen by the heat in Richie’s eyes.

Mouth pressed into a tight, hard line, he dares her to respond.

“Well, I thought—” she starts, voice soft in a way that he’s only heard once before. He can barely make out what she’s saying over the mid-morning din of this embarrassingly trendy coffee shop, but he doesn’t really want to hear it anyway.

Her words are careful, though, her tone measured. His are too fast, too biting, to be wholly his own. Even as he insists that he’s ready, that he’s _ okay_, Eddie bleeds into his very essence: “Thought what?”

“I just thought… _ Eddie_.”

It takes everything in his power not to just fucking _ unravel _.

Instead, he does what he’s always done best: he swallows it down, and he lies through his teeth.)


End file.
